Yeats’s poem plucks this instrument of “perpetual tension” and creates evocative poetry that takes the reader on a voyage along the Greek Myth of Leda and the Swan while asking vast, powerful, and demanding questions that arise from the story. the base rhythm and the variation” (“Versification,” from The Norton Anthology ). “Variation, surprise, is the very essence of every artist’s trade and one of the most important sources of metrical power and pleasure is the perpetual tension between. The poem starts off as an English style sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet with the quatrains rhyming abab et cetera, and the couplet rhyming with itself) but switches into the Italian form after the second quatrain with a set of tercets that make up a sestet rhyming cde cde. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? My reading of Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” showed fifteen deviations from iambic pentameter. How can those terrified vague fing ers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. William Butler Yeats - "Leda and the Swan" A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |